Learning through Incompetence
It was my first week of high school, and like many ninth-graders, most of my prior education had consisted of rote memorization and recitation of lyrics disguised as patterns and mathematics. My free time had largely consisted of video games and an abundance of ogling photos of ladies in lingerie, being too young to have a job or a car, and too old to have a life.
My classes were somewhat typical. I was in a slightly-more-advanced-than-average math class, and had the regular-version of everything else; Spanish, English, History, Choir, and Biology.
I won’t name her here (we can refer to her as Ms. D), but the Biology teacher was clearly someone who had never fully grown up, and wanted desperately to be the “cool” educator. She would laugh at the obnoxious students jokes, she’d make vague allusions to sex (the infinite taboo to a teenage boy), and didn’t seem overly concerned with the whole teaching thing.
As a kid whose previous exposure to high school life had largely consisted of reruns of “Saved by the Bell” and “Power Rangers”, this seemed relatively normal, though in hindsight I now think it’s incredibly weird when teachers do this; if you saw a forty-five year old man becoming best friends with a fourteen year old kid, you’d probably assume something pretty fucking horrible. At least I would, maybe my mind is just in the gutter.
Anyway, on the third day of class, we received a pop quiz about significant digits, which we had been learning about for the first two days, and with which I felt I had a relatively strong comprehension.
Well, I was apparently wrong about that. I received a fifty-five percent on it, which upset me, uncharacteristically so, as I didn’t generally care a lot about grades, but I also didn’t want to feel like a moron who couldn’t even understand one of the simplest things in expressing numbers in science, and so that night I did what I always did; hopped onto the internet.
This time was different, though. This time I was going to avoid the typical and shameful porn marathon that fourteen-year-old boys engage, and instead look for as much information as I could about how to calculate significant digits.
After a bit of practice, I had the practice down pat. I was able to pass all the practice quizzes that I found online, and I knew that in the future, I could pass any test involving them.
It didn’t take a terribly long time for this skill to be put to the test, as there was another quiz two days later, specifically because the teacher was unimpressed with the results from the last quiz. I answered the questions, knowing that this time I would get a perfect score, redeeming myself entirely and becoming the king of Biology. It’s easy to have gandiose ideas when you’re a teenager.
I was mistaken, however; this time I got an even lower score, a forty-three percent, and I knew that this couldn’t be right, and low and behold, upon checking my answered, I realized that I *was* right. Every single answer I had provided was correct, and to prove it I found a significant digit calculator online that night to check. I tried explaining this to the teacher, and she was convinced that I was just being a sore sport, and I should just learn to live with my mistakes. I (and several other students in the class) suddenly understood something that should have been obvious, but that we had previous chose to ignore: this instructor was incompetent, a grade-A moron who had no business being a teacher.
I was pretty upset, but I suddenly realized that there was one key takaway from this; I had learned something on my own to compensate for the Ms D’s inability to comprehend her own material. I had, on my own volition, found out how to do significant digits, with no coercion from my parents, teachers, or anyone else, and the only way in hell I was going to get any grasp on biology was if I completely ignored what the teacher said and read up on it myself.
This turned out to be a good decision; I read through several biology books, took copious notes from them, and managed to end up with an “A” in the class, as a result of the fact that, after the significant digits quiz, she used the tests provided by McGraw Hill, which had an answer key written by people who had a handle on the subject.
Upon reflecting on this, I owe this teacher everything. The only truly-valuable skill that anyone will pay me for is my ability to learn new things relatively quickly, and this has been so valuable to a non-college-graduate that I find it difficult to even quantify.
This made me wonder; how unique am I in this? I doubt I’m the first person to come to this conclusion, and I have to ask if there are a disproportionate number of autodidacts who realized the idiocy of their teacher(s) and used it as a springboard to short-circuit what colleges try to do: teach yourself how to teach yourself.
Ms. D is still at that school, and while I haven’t been there in years, I seriously doubt she has improved as a teacher, and perhaps because of this, her classroom will become a factory of self-educators, waiting to write their own blog posts thanking her.
